Disclaimer: I don't own Supernatural.

Another day and night spent in the panic room, and Sam had learned to bite his tongue when he felt his irritability rising. He learned that the best way to deal with it was to ask Dean for some time alone so that no one would be around for him to lash out at.

Not that Dean seemed to care. He let Sam hurl anything he had at him, and Sam suspected that Dean saw it as a punishment for himself, as if part of Sam's predicament had been his fault. Sam didn't see it that way, but nobody could drown themselves in undeserved guilt better than a Winchester.

As frustrating as it was to tire so quickly, Sam was sick of lying around. He needed to help in dealing with the demon, and that led him to kneeling on the floor of his room on Bobby's second floor and digging through a box he kept in the corner of his closet so he could pile bulky journals with pages that no longer laid flat due to the amount of times they'd been flipped in Dean's arms.

"What the hell is all this, Sam?" he asked.

"I did some research of my own on ways to handle demons," he said. "I had plenty of time for it in the years I lived with Bobby."

"What made you decide to switch from trying to get rid of demons to working with one?"

Sam threw a glance over his shoulder at Dean, then turned his focus back to the half-empty box in front of him. He didn't need to see Dean's face when he gave a response. He didn't want to see it.

"When the voice in your head talks enough, eventually you start to listen," he said. "Eventually, you start to believe it."

"What? What does that mean, Sam?" Dean asked. "Was that bastard hanging around in your head even before you left?"

Sam nodded, and found himself pulled to his feet and turned to face Dean. Dean's eyes searched his face.

"How long?"

"I think it started when we were staying with Pastor Jim."

Like the energy had been drained from him, Dean's hands fell from their perches on Sam's shoulders. He faced away from Sam, then turned to face him again and ran his hand through his hair.

"That long?"

Sam shrugged.

"Why didn't you say anything?"

Sam shrugged again. "I didn't know what to think of it at first, and he talked about my powers a lot. And about breaking to be rebuilt stronger. I couldn't exactly tell you and expect you to not grill me over why he was visiting my dreams. Then, it stopped for a while when you guys found out. Remember the night I locked myself in the bathroom because my memories of what happened came back?"

"Not a night I'll be forgetting any time soon."

"Well, after that, you guys wouldn't let me sleep without being full of sleeping pill so that he couldn't visit my sleep."

"When did he start showing up again?" Dean asked. With the way that Dean's voice nearly cracked, Sam knew that his brother was taking every word he said as a personal failure.

"After you guys found out about my powers and I ran. I didn't have enough money for the Greyhound bus, but the employee at the station gave me one anyway."

"What does that have to do with the demon?"

"I saw her eyes turn yellow eyes for a second. I thought I was losing my mind at first—as if it wasn't already lost—but now I'm guessing that the demon wanted me separated from you and Dad."

They stood in silence for a while. Sam had taken to staring at the floor and his own feet. Dean started pacing across the length of the room.

"I wish you'd told me," Dean said.

"I'm sorry."

An apology was all Sam had to offer. His reasons for not telling Dean made sense to him then, and they still did now. He could almost feel Dean blaming himself for it, like he had lost Sam's trust somewhere along the way and that was why he didn't say anything.

Telling Dean that he would make the same choices again if given the chance wouldn't help anybody.

Dean cleared his throat. "So, all of these?" he asked, lifting the stack of journals he held.

"Are my research notes."

"No shit? Dude, something here has to be useful, right?"

"Plenty is, but not all of it was attainable at the time I did the research," Sam said. "Turns out demons have a vested interest in guarding things that could kill them."

"That's to be expected, I guess," Dean said. "C'mon, let's sort through this mess in the panic room. You can fill me in on demon killing."

Sam took pages inserted in the journals and laid them out on the desk in the panic room. An hour later, he'd explained the information he'd scrounged up to Dean. Unfortunately, he could tell that it wasn't clicking for him yet.

"How did you even start finding any of this? I couldn't find any shit that was worthwhile when I started looking."

"It was an accident," Sam said. "Another hunter called Bobby for some help in researching a hunt. It turned out that he found himself facing one of the lesser Persian gods. When I was helping find ways to kill it, I just stumbled upon this and I dug deeper and deeper until I knew everything about it I could find."

"How do you even pronounce this?" Dean asked.

"Well, it translates out to 'the emerald-studded sword'," Sam said. "I don't think we need to know the proper pronunciation for it. We just need to get it and swing it."

"Are you sure it will work?"

"There's no way to be positive, but the stories I found all mentioned using it to cull demons who were disguised as humans. While the stories don't say it outright, I'm guessing that implies that the sword can kill a demon as long as it's in a vessel."

"I'm guessing that kills the vessel, too," Dean said.

"Yes," Sam said, "but we might have to make that sacrifice if it means getting the demon out of the picture once and for all."

"We don't have to make any decisions right now."

Sam nodded. "Anyway, the sword traded hands a lot. You know, a hunter trains another hunter and passes the sword along when they die kind of thing. Or it gets stolen and disappears. It disappeared for a while, but I picked up its trail again when I found an article about a wicked man having been cut down by an ornate sword decorated with emeralds. I figured there wasn't anything else it could be, and the best part was that the hunter used it in front of witnesses, so I found his name."

"And you're sure you know where it is?" Dean asked.

"Again, about as sure as I can be. The hunter had a house that he left abandoned when he died. Luckily, no one seems to want it and it's stayed abandoned."

"We don't have that kind of luck," Dean said. "What's the catch?"

Sam sighed. "There are signs that the place is surrounded by demons. I bet they were put on guard duty and told to rip apart anyone who walked off the property with that sword."

"So, they can't get near it themselves?"

"Doesn't look like it," Sam said. He looked around the panic room. "But I guess all hunters have their ways to keep demons out."

"I wish Dad was here to see all this," Dean said. "You found what none of us could. Even Dad is still working on possible leads."

Sam's excitement at sharing his work faded. "It was just something I stumbled on," he said. "It was curiosity and wishful thinking, and it still doesn't mean anything since we don't have a way to get the sword without being immediately killed by a small army of demons."

Dean clapped a hand on Sam's shoulder. "We'll figure something out."

Sam nodded and thought back to the rest of the journals in his box that he hadn't handed to Dean, where he had figured something out for getting the sword. He never intended to use the information that he stored in them, not until that moment.

Sacrifices were necessary in their line of work sometimes, and Sam had sacrificed plenty of lives already for what he saw as the greater good.

"I only have one son."

"I wish you were here to see all the stuff that Sam's found over the years," Dean said, exiled from the panic room once more as per Sam's request. He wished that Sam would get it through his head that Dean was fine dealing with him when he started acting up. It wasn't his fault that he ended up addicted to demon blood; Dean should have been there for him all these years.

"Yeah, sounds like he's been busy," John said through the phone.

"Maybe you should come back and help us figure out how to get that sword out."

"I'm still checking out The Colt," John said. "I know Sam's worked hard, but there are a lot of chances that we'd be taking with placing all of our bets on one thing. I know The Colt was designed to kill any supernatural creature. That sword sounds like it might be able to kill a demon, but only if that demon is occupying a vessel. What happens if they decide to leave the vessel behind the second they see us with that sword?"

"I don't know," Dean said. "But isn't it worth trying?"

"You two keep digging for now and take care of Sam's withdrawal while I finish with the remaining leads," John said. "Don't do anything until I get back, understood?"

"Yes, sir," Dean said.

John ended the call, and Dean sunk into Bobby's couch, grabbing the remote and flipping through the channels.

Bobby entered the house a few minutes later, wiping oil stains from his hands with an old rag. "Got kicked out again?"

Dean nodded.

"Well, at least he ain't practically seizing anymore. Or seeing things."

"I know, but I wish he'd let me help him."

"Believe me, that boy is more alive now than he was in all the time he lived here," Bobby said.

"Did he ever seem off or, I don't know, bothered while he lived here?" Dean asked.

"Of course, he did," Bobby said. "But after all he went through, I couldn't blame him."

"He told me that the demon was in his head," Dean said. "He told me that it was why he ended up leaving."

"What?"

"Yeah," Dean said. "I guess he got better at hiding things than we thought."

Bobby took a deep breath and tossed the oil-stained rag to the side. "I think there's a pot of coffee calling my name," he said.

"I think that it's a bottle of whiskey calling my name," Dean said, "but coffee will have to do."

Bobby moved into the kitchen, and Dean heard the ancient coffee maker's protests as he started it.

While he craved the burn of alcohol, he didn't know if Sam still reacted poorly to the scent of it. With all his failures coming to light, the last thing he needed was to traumatize Sam even more.

"Where are you hiding?"

Sam stood in the middle of a field that stretched to infinity in all directions. Wind blew his hair and forced the knee-high grass to bow in waves. It was the sky that tipped him off the most that he was dreaming. The sky was light, but he saw nothing in it. No clouds. No sun, moon, or stars.

"Come back to me, Sam."

He knew that voice almost as well as he knew his own, and he scanned the field for a pair of yellow eyes that he couldn't find.

"I know you liked the high."

"I didn't know that you were slipping your blood into my mouth while I slept," Sam said, his anger and disgust coating his words. "That's not liking something by choice."

"Even now, you're craving more," the demon said, ignoring Sam. "You may have gotten it out of your system, but your system is already hooked."

Sam started walking, even if he didn't see anywhere to go.

"You'll always be hooked."

He tried to shake off the demon's words.

"You'll always be an addict. A run-of-the-mill junkie seeking out his next hit."

He walked faster.

"You can hide, but I'll find you," the demon said.

Sam felt breath on his ear.

"I'll always find you."

Sam woke up in the panic room, finding Dean still asleep nearby. He rolled from side to side until he ended up staring at the ceiling on his back, waiting for his racing heart to calm down.

He didn't know how long he'd been asleep, but it didn't feel sufficient. He felt the burn as his eyes begged to be closed again, but his mind was running a mile a minute and sleeping was last on its list of things to do.

He tried to listen to Dean's breathing and let it lull him to sleep like it had when he was a child. When all his problems could be washed away with a promise from his big brother.

Once it was clear that sleep would be eluding him, he got up and snuck out of the panic room up to his old room. The mess that he'd unintentionally made Dean stay awake through worked in his favor in that Dean was deep enough asleep that he didn't notice Sam's absence and follow him.

Sam was tired in more ways than one, but he figured that the saying was true. There is no rest for the wicked.

He slid his hand to the bottom of the box he kept his research in and pulled out a single piece of paper with a list of ingredients scrawled on it.

Graveyard dirt.

A black cat's bone or milk from a black cow.

A picture.

Yarrow flowers planted at a crossroads.

He sat on the edge of his bed. This was a bad idea, but he knew that he wouldn't be able to get the emerald-studded sword away from demons without the help of demons.

He also knew that the yellow eyed demon couldn't know about his plans. There were no doubts in his mind that the demon would hesitate to kill him the second he became a possible threat. Favoritism only extended so far.

He tucked the paper into his pocket. Funny how something he mulled over years ago was about to become his best option. The best option for all of them. Back when he first found this list and its use, he didn't know what he would ask for in the first place.

Now, he knew.

Tomorrow. If he could slip away from Dean for long enough, he'd go tomorrow and prevent his family from trying anything reckless for the sake of taking care of the demon.

By doing something reckless himself. He smiled a bit, but it faded quickly and he tried to untwist his stomach from the knots it tied itself in.

He just hoped his tainted soul was worth something.

Author's Note: Uh-oh. Sam has a bad idea. We're getting kind of close to the end of this trilogy, we just need to wrap up Yellow Eyes.

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